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Show Acting Alone pa g e 355 Even in his panic, though, he'd gathered up the assigned parcel and moved it overland with great care, even respect - testimony to the deep loyalty he felt to the old man even still, who knows why. How could such a tight-lipped man command such loyalty from someone like Axelrad, who'd always had a chronic problem with authority figures? Axelrad had actually slowed his flight from gore and chaos and death today in order to make a delivery for this man, a delivery of an object about whose vaguest, most general nature he could only speculate. Could it be that Axelrad had been permanently mesmerized, robotized, just like the Moonies and the Hare Krishna assholes and the Jonestowners, like all the quasi-religious zombie-types for whom he'd always reserved the greater portion of his contempt, like the Companions themselves? God knows, there could be some Companions suffering these same thoughts along with Axelrad, the same little pestering notions inside that keep telling them, mistakenly of course, that they are still individually identifiable human beings. Axelrad had always suspected that he'd been placed in a certifiable hypnotic trance that first day back in Chicago, when he'd heard only the old man's voice and not his words. But since then he'd tried to persuade himself that some measurable portion of his actions had been initiated under his own volition. Sometimes on good days, like when he'd managed to conjure up enough fresh and/or purloined meat to feed a goodly number of his co-campers, he could almost believe that it had been he who'd placed his own self-determined person in the encampment, primarily for the advancement of his own academic ends, and that it was young Axelrad who was using old Cicerone, rather than the other way around. |